Kurds and supporters gather in Hamburg

From April 15 – 17, 2017 in Hamburg, Germany the Kurdish freedom movement held its third instantiation of Challenging Capitalist Modernity, the biennial conference dedicated to ‘democratic modernity’ and the ideas developed by imprisoned Kurdish political leader Abdullah Ocalan.

On the first day, over 1,200 activists, scholars, and students packed into a vast lecture hall, the University of Hamburg’s Audimax, with seven interpreter booths and two balconies. Outside, blossoming trees and vivid new grass lined the walkways, [...]

Epistemologies of Freedom: Interview with a young Kurdish revolutionary

Interview with a young revolutionary from Kobane, also a careful student of Ocalan’s thinking. He offers a brief account of his experiences as well as reflections on the Rojava Revolution, social ecology, and Turkey’s recent betrayal of the Kurdish Movement: "Unless the Middle East overcomes the nation-state, it can never be a peaceful region."

On Europe’s anti-fracking movements

From an article posted to ROAR Magazine by ISE board member Eleanor Finley and UK climate activist Claire Fauset:

… The threat of fracking and its nakedly undemocratic geopolitical context lays bare the bankruptcy of capitalism and the state as its attaché. For this reason, we are beginning to see that the global anti-fracking movement is more than just a “not in my backyard” movement. Ordinary people around the world are beginning to question a political-economic system which, even in the face of global climate collapse, claims that there are [...]

Social Ecology, Kurdistan, & the Origins of Freedom

Reflections on a recent visit to Turkey and North Kurdistan. Many Kurdish revolutionaries describe their struggle as one of organic society against authoritarian society and have forged a unique role in the continuing evolution of human freedom.

Hamburg conference features scholars & Kurdish activists

In Kurdish, “roj” means sun. Rojava is the land to the west, where the setting sun of freedom and possibility lays to rest and renew itself. Last week, I spent three days at Hamburg University as part of Challenging Capitalist Modernity, a conference hosted by a network of organizations within the Kurdish Freedom Movement. Each evening, the sun shone down brightly through a tall glass wall into the conference lobby. There hundreds of people gathered from all over Europe [...]

Social ecologists in Colombia

El Collectivo Ambiente de Tabanoy (CAT): Social Ecologists in Columbia link indigenous medicine, permaculture, and the call for communal politics.

The Collectivo Ambiente de Tabanoy is a popular education project dedicated to sharing social ecological principles in Cristobol, Columbia.

Cristobol is a suburb of the capital city of Bogota with many indigenous, peasant and worker communities. For over six years, these edukadores de kalle [street educators] have been organizing education and cultural programs which link social and ecological issues. Through these programs, the CAT serves as a watershed for activism throughout the region.

“To Revisit Spain,” by Eleanor Finley

“The silence that gathers around Spain, like a bad conscience, attests to the fact that the events are very much alive.” – Murray Bookchin, To Remember Spain.
In the late 1960’s, social ecologist Murray Bookchin traveled throughout Spain and Catalonia collecting the history of Spanish anarchism. Though the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War was highly-publicized throughout the “democratic” west, few accounts ever dealt seriously with the social revolution that took place within in. Furthermore, no definitive history existed of the Spanish anarchism that fueled these events, a political movement dating back to the mid-19th century. Murray set out to write this history and, in the process, shed light on the development of revolutionary Left theory and practice.

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The Symbiosis Research Collective will be speaking at the ISE Annual Gathering this weekend - read their excellent prize-winning article Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid here:

"Our aim in this essay is to channel our struggles against oppression and domination into a strategic approach toward building real utopias—to transform the poetry of Occupy into the prose of real social change. Both concrete and comprehensive, our proposal is to organize practical community institutions ofparticipatory democracy and mutual aid that can take root, grow, and gradually supplant the institutions that now rule ordinary people’s lives.

This next system we imagine is a libertarian ecosocialism grounded in the direct participation of citizens rather than the unaccountable authority of elites; in the social ownership of the economy rather than exploitation; in the equality of human beings rather than the social hierarchies of race, gender, nationality, and class; in the defense of our common home and its nonhuman inhabitants rather than unfettered environmental destruction; and in the restoration of community rather than isolation. Above all else, our aim is to lay out a framework forcrafting such a society from the ground up—to, as the Wobblies declared, build the new world in the shell of the old." ... See MoreSee Less

Our first online course Ecology, Democracy, Utopia was a great success! In response to high demand we are now offering a self-directed course featuring the same video lectures, readings, and discussion forums but without the fixed time commitment of a weekly seminar. This allows for more flexible pa...

"Bookchin was an advocate of an eclectic form of environmentalist anti-capitalism. In "Ecology of Freedom" (1982), he argued that man’s destruction of the environment is the result of his domination of other men, and only by doing away with all hierarchies – man over woman, old over young, white over black, rich over poor – could humanity avert ecological and economic collapse. In "The Rise of Urbanisation and the Decline of Citizenship" (1987) and "Urbanisation without Cities" (1992), he proposed "libertarian municipalism" as an alternative to representative democracy and authoritarian state-socialism: directly democratic assemblies would confederate into larger networks and eventually topple state power. His 24 published books had earned him admirers such as Grace Paley, Noam Chomsky and Ursula LeGuin (who based her novel "The Dispossessed" in part on Bookchin’s early work)..." ... See MoreSee Less